Balboa Park: A mistake of historic proportions

Editor's note: The 1915-16 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego provided a major impetus for the creation of Balboa Park as it appears today with its Spanish Renaissance-style buildings. As the city plans the centennial celebration of the exposition, some civic leaders are promoting a project to remove parking spaces in the park’s Plaza de Panama and return the square back to a pedestrian-only space. Below, a plan critic warns that it would ruin the historic character of the iconic park landscape.

The Cabrillo Bridge and Laurel Street entrance to Balboa Park is San Diego’s most iconic image, instantly recognizable to all who call this place home and to visitors from around the world. It is a National Historic Landmark in great part because it launched a nationwide love affair with Spanish Colonial-style architecture as well as an international exposition that put San Diego on the map. This esteemed status is given only to the nation’s most revered places like Mt. Vernon, the Golden Gate Bridge or Gettysburg.

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To destroy the architectural beauty of this architectural masterpiece and its Mediterranean landscape and jeopardize the park’s hard-won National Landmark status is unthinkable – yet that is exactly what is being proposed.

San Diego is being asked to suffer this irreversible loss to yield 272 parking spaces, 100 of them for valet. All agree that parking should be banished from the Plaza de Panama, but at what cost to city coffers and to our souls?

Picture this: The proposed project will spend $45 million plus to:

•Crash through the majestic Cabrillo Bridge and attach a freeway-style, 45-foot-wide concrete off-ramp;

•Turn the tranquil Alcazar Garden area into a traffic-snarled drop-off zone for freight, buses, valet service and able and disabled passengers, all crossing two harrowing lanes of dense traffic;

Imagine this experience and then compare it with the spectacular drive or walk we enjoy today through the arched entry into another world.

Add to this nightmare, miles of retaining walls and 42-inch-tall railings to keep people from falling into the roadway ditch plus regrading of the Alcazar parking lot, the area between the Organ Pavilion and the Plaza de Panama, and the plaza itself.

One look at the project renderings brings instantly to mind bland business parks designed by heavy-handed traffic engineers. San Diegans would be left with a ravaged, unrecognizable Balboa Park.

The Plaza de Panama project is radical elective surgery, when ethics and honor dictate, “First, do no harm.” This plan does great harm and for appallingly little benefit. There are many less intrusive ways to remove 54 parking spaces from the plaza and to encourage pedestrian access throughout the park. Managed bridge traffic, as is done in many big-city parks, and simple restriping of current parking areas would recover the 54 spaces and more.

Serious economic flaws also plague the plan. Modern and inappropriate changes would deter visits to the world-renowned destination and would seriously damage the economic vitality of the city and region. What’s more, it’s an underhanded way of introducing paid parking into what is the “People’s Park.” Balboa Park, like the beaches, where parking is free, is one of the few places in the city where people of all walks of life can and do mingle.

The City Council must demonstrate leadership and fiscal responsibility on July 9 by rejecting the Plaza de Panama plan, as designed. This could be the most important decision these elected officials ever make because it will shape the way the world sees San Diego. Will our image be of great beauty and culture and historic significance or one of ugly and aggressive use of concrete and a total disregard for arts and culture? Will council members blindly follow Mayor Jerry Sanders’ flawed plan because a little money is on the table from a powerful donor, even while knowing that the real cost of construction and long-term maintenance is on the citizens dime? Or will they stand up for Balboa Park and their constituents?

Many terrible things have been done to Balboa Park over the years: freeways, the Naval Hospital cut into it, original Expo buildings destroyed, and a landfill was allowed. But the Plaza de Panama proposal is the worst of these and we cannot allow it. If we do, San Diegans will regret it forever, and when future generations ask how could we let this happen, what will be the answer?